Besting Your Plan’s Performance: The Time To Start 2012 Strategic Planning is Now

You Should Be Getting Year-Over-Year Performance Increases

If plan governance isn’t instilled as a core element of the executive team’s reality, focus on accomplishing strategy wains quickly.  Why?  Because time flies past rapidly and organizations face so many daily distractions that the interference begins to blur the big picture for all but the most focused executives. Ideally, strategic plans should be refreshed quarterly, updated annually and rewritten every three years. It should be an ongoing part of business operations to re-check against plan goals and objectives.

Corporate plan management is a day-to-day and week-by-week activity.  The long-held belief that strategic plans are addressed once a year serves to obfuscate the ever-green nature of what plans really represent.  They require a switch in our mindset away from treating strategic planning as if it were a project.  Instead, it is an ongoing journey that requires us to recheck our position against the map frequently to avoid getting lost.

The Double-Win: Six Factors For Achieving Sustained Growth in the Top-line and Profitability

Achieving and then sustaining top-line growth requires sound strategy and a lot of hard work.  Quarter-over-quarter revenue growth is strong evidence of an organization with a well-conceived strategy that has achieved operational excellence in areas like new customer acquisition, existing customer retention and innovation in product / service value creation.  But what about achieving sustained profitability when growing the top line?  That can be more challenging.  This article explores six important factors needed for positioning your organization for the double-win of sustained growth and profitability.